Crossing to Motherhood

It's an unseasonably warm afternoon in April 1986, and I'm sitting on a stone bench outside a Dairy Queen near our house in Minneapolis, considering the two mothers and three children who share my table. I'm about to turn 39 years old, which is why I'm so interested in mothers and children.

I haven't always been so interested. In fact, for most of my adult life I've behaved as if mothers and children had nothing to do with me, which, on the whole, they haven't. But lately I can't take my eyes off them. I'm in the process of making (for me) a mind-boggling discovery: Women have children. It's what women do. A lot of them, it seems. Most of them, from what I can tell. Now that the blinders have dropped from my eyes, I'm amazed, dazzled, puzzled and afraid.

One of the mothers is younger than I, the first detail I note about her. Blond hair, good teeth, and I wonder if she works outside the home, since it's the middle of the afternoon and she's in Bermuda shorts. For all I know she's the president of IBM, but something tells me her job is raising the little girl beside her, who is eating an ice cream cone dipped in waxy-looking butterscotch. The ice cream is running down the child's hands, grasped around the cone in a double-fisted grip, dripping onto her shorts and bare legs, which are covered in downy hair so fair it is translucent. There is a pasty white ring around her mouth, which I would love to wipe off.

Soon the little girl has ice cream pretty much all over her. "Oh well, I'll just have to throw her in the bathtub when I get home anyway," the younger mother says, and laughs self-deprecatingly, as if the joke were on her. I am touched by her--to say the mundane, the unremarkable thing. The two mothers begin conversing, exchanging information about the children's ages and such, but what I want to know is, What is it like to be a mother? I want the skinny, the good and the bad, the sublime and the tedious.

But it's a warm spring afternoon at Dairy Queen, and I'm not about to rend the social fabric by asking such a question. Besides, I know what they'd probably say, once they recovered from the shock of someone so out of it. They might start with a little humor, but then if I pressed them on it, go on to say that children change your life, but that they are worth it. Which doesn't really speak to the uninitiated. So what I must really want to know is something neither they nor anyone else can tell me: Should I be a mother?

It's true that my husband, Jeff, and I are not using birth control. We haven't been for quite some time. (I won't let myself remember how long.) But I tell myself we're not really trying. Trying is for people who want a child, and I'm not sure. Jeff is leaving it mainly up to me. He says he can be happy either way and, besides, he has his hands full, dealing with the barely contained insanity of a small law firm, something they didn't teach him in law school. We both know it would be my life that would change most if we had a child. Maybe it doesn't have to be that way, but that's the way it is. Jeff would still get dressed in a suit every day and go off to his office downtown, and I would be mainly responsible for baby.

I believe in making a conscious choice where having a child is concerned. But in the meantime, I've been hoping nature would just take its course. But nothing has happened. I haven't gotten pregnant. I'm not going to be let off the hook. If we do want a child, if we're ever going to have one, we've got to do something about it.

Patty Hart, my gynecologist at the Women's Health Care Center, was the kind of serious, bright girl all the other girls liked in high school, but whom the boys considered only as a pal. At my initial meeting with her, I was full of worries and concern about what I was embarking on, wringing my hands, fretting. I hadn't wanted to have to arrive at this moment, where I had to be talking about possible fertility problems. But Patty was straightforward, outlining what steps we'd take to investigate whether something was wrong or not.

The first thing she did was have Jeff's sperm checked out. He got back an excellent report, all systems go, so we moved on to me, to a Huhner test. Jeff and I had intercourse one morning, and then I went in so Patty could extract some of the mucus to see if the sperm were alive and well. From between my upraised knees, she held up a two-pronged instrument with a silvery string of my mucus suspended from prong to prong. "Fantastic," she said. "Spin. You have great mucus."

I doubted that anyone else would ever say that to me. I felt the warm glow of accomplishment and was reminded that I would accept strokes for just about anything.

I joined Patty at the microscope, where she was observing the interaction of the sperm with the mucus. "Want to see?" she asked, and I was brought back to my high school days, the last time I looked through a microscope. I bent my head, adjusted the eyepiece and focus, and Jeff's sperm came into view, exactly the way I'd seen them in films about reproduction, only now I was looking at Jeff's sperm, wiggling around in my mucus. "This is amazing!" I exclaimed, and a nurse-midwife passing by laughed. I felt deeply excited and interested, and expansively fertile.

Patty had scheduled me for a series of blood tests during the second half of my cycle, and when I went in to see her, I got a shock. The blood work showed I had low progesterone. I needed to have an endometrial biopsy, in which a little bit of the lining of my uterus would be scraped off at a certain point in my cycle to see if it were rich and thick enough after ovulation. If it wasn't, that would confirm a luteal phase defect.

I wandered out of her office in a daze. Something was actually wrong with me. I might have a luteal phase defect, which sounded as if something were off with the moon instead of my hormones.

I looked up luteal phase defect in one of the books I had bought. Perhaps 3 percent to 10 percent of women have luteal phase defect related to hormone deficiencies, I read. It was sometimes treated, as Patty had told me, with Clomid, a drug that told the brain to make more estrogen. Clomid was the drug my friend Lauren was taking. When she first told me she was going to take it, I thought, A fertility drug! How extreme. I would never go that far.

Now I said to Patty: Bring it on.

After six months on Clomid, Paulette decides to see an infertility specialist, Dr. Paul Kuneck. At his suggestion, she and Jeff try artificial insemination.

Linda from Dr. Kuneck's office called. The pregnancy test is positive, she exclaimed. You're pregnant! Pregnant? I stuttered back to her. That's amazing! But I could hardly believe it. I was thrilled. But--could it work? I called Jeff immediately and told him the news. He said he was thrilled, too, but we were both a little stunned. It seemed like such a monumental thing and, at the same time, so little--a few cells beginning to multiply. I had always heard that you couldn't be just a little bit pregnant, but now I realized that you could.

Several weeks passed, and I was still pregnant. My blood work showed everything progressing well, and everywhere I went, and everything I did, I carried with me the knowledge, the beautiful secret, that I was pregnant. I was enjoying being a pregnant person. I had always wanted to eat for two.

Jeff went with me for the ultrasound. I lay on a table with my pants off, and Chad, the ultrasound technician, a person of delicate sensibilities given the circumstances, had me insert a probe into my vagina. We watched as my uterus came onto the screen, like a weather map, and then we saw it, the dark spot, the fetal sac, there, where it should be. While Chad took measurements and pictures of it, Jeff and I gazed and gazed.

Dr. Kuneck came in. He stared at the screen. He told us that at this stage, in 70 percent of the cases, we'd be able to see the heartbeat. But maybe it was not mature enough yet, and I should come back next week. We'd see. All I could do was wait and see. We still felt lucky. Hopeful.

It is hard to receive bad news in public. It is hard, of course, to receive it in private, but in public, one feels (I feel) the need to maintain some composure.

I was lying on the examination table in the ultrasound room a week later. Jeff was in federal court, trying a case, and it hadn't occurred to me to ask someone else to come with me. I thought of myself as braced for bad news.

I'd been there 40 minutes now, and I was bored with the whole thing. I had a crick in my neck from trying to stare at the monitor to my right, and in some way, I didn't even care anymore. I looked at the ceiling. I couldn't get any answers out of this girl. She deferred to the doctor, naturally--"he'll have to be the one to say"--and I shrugged, wondering what I would do in her situation, what I would say. I'd like to think I'd come out with it. The truth. Dr. Kuneck arrived, grave in the darkened room, and I didn't even look at the screen anymore. I was not in suspense. I wanted to go home. He and the technician stared at the screen for a long time. Finally I said, impatient, "Well, what do you see?"

Now it came: words that both surprised me and yet seemed familiar, as if I'd already heard them. "Do you want me to give it to you straight?" he asked, and with those words, he already had.

There was a flurry--a scurry--on the part of the lab technician. She wanted to get out of there fast. Then we were alone. I sat up. Of course I do, I said in a firm voice. So he said it: I don't believe at this point that the pregnancy is viable.

The world went on, I sat there, we talked a few minutes, some statistics, his favorite thing, were tossed about, and he said he'd see me in his office in a few moments. I knew that I had my eyes open, and I found my way down the corridors of the hospital that I knew so well, but I was like a blind person. Something was wrong, and it seemed to be in me, it seemed to be building in me; but at the same time, I couldn't quite feel it, I couldn't see it. It was growing.

By the time I reached my doctor's office, I was filled to the brim with it. I stood by the reception desk. I had the idea that I could not go into the waiting area and take a chair, and I felt that if I stood there, which was as far as I had been able to get, Dr. Kuneck would see me right away. Linda was coming around the desk to me, and suddenly I realized I couldn't wait, I had to get out to my car, because the feeling, whatever it was, was overwhelming me. I tried to say to her: I better make an appointment and come back. That was clearly what I wanted to say, something simple and easy; it made sense to me, but I was unable to speak. I tried to get these words out, and I couldn't tell if I was succeeding. Then, before I knew it, a terrible sob ripped out of me. It had a life of its own, it was out of my control, and the "I" I thought I knew dissolved in the face of this awful sound; I was reduced to this horrible, wrenching Sob.

Several months had passed since the pregnancy, and I didn't know whether we should try again. One night I dreamed that I had lost my cat Charlotte. I never saw her in the dream--she was already gone. I tore through the dream house, searching for Charlotte. The irrefutable truth was impressing itself on me, like news of a death. Charlotte was gone.

An enormous grief was welling in me, an inconsolable despair. Something--someone--infinitely precious to me, loved beyond reason--could not be recovered. It took the form of a white cat. I was so inconsolable that I woke up.

And I knew at once that the dream was about losing a child or, more precisely, losing the hope of having a child. This truth spoke to me with complete certainty. And I knew, too, that I was not ready to give up.

Deciding to try again, I felt happy. I had undergone a miraculous cure. All the pain I had been feeling disappeared. Hope came back, tender and green. Jeff wanted to try again, too, he said. It might not be too late. I had gotten pregnant once. I could get pregnant again. It still might work out.

We decided on a game plan. We would try for six more months, six more months of Clomid and artificial insemination. It was nothing, really, compared to what a lot of people go through, but it was still hard for me. Infertility treatment is not something to prolong lightly. After six months, if I wasn't pregnant, we'd reassess.

The first month went by. The second. The third. Fourth. Fifth. Sixth. They went by that fast, like snaps of the fingers.

Reassessment. We sat in Dr. Kuneck's office and heard the possibilities: Keep on with what we were doing, Clomid and artificial insemination; escalate the treatment by taking Pergonal injections to hyperstimulate my ovaries (hyperstimulate my ovaries?); move to a high-tech procedure; or come to closure.

"Am I your oldest patient?"

Dr. Kuneck looked at me with some surprise.

"Why, no," he said.

"Well, then, how old is your oldest patient?"

"Forty-eight."

I put my head down on his desk and beat it softly.

Then it was May, and I was 43 years old.

I knew that adoption was an option. But I wasn't sure it was one that I wanted to pursue. What a decision to make! I could end the pain I was feeling, I could adopt, I could have a child, and yet I wasn't going to. An inner sense told me that what I needed to do was get through this, that there would be life beyond--my life. But I wasn't sure I could do it. Giving up on a child felt like a death. It was a death, but there was no ritual,

I asked Jeff how he felt about not having children. "Well, I feel regret," he said, "but having children is something I didn't get in my life. I can't spend the rest of my life feeling bad about it."

I understood what he meant. Having children was something we didn't get. A certain amount of luck is involved. Life doesn't always give you what you expect or want, though it may give you different, possibly better things.

I used to imagine a shadow self, a woman who was another version of me. She had stayed on in South Carolina, married a doctor, had children, and whirled around town in a station wagon, chauffeuring everybody to dentist appointments, piano lessons, girl scouts--just as my mother had done. Even though I knew better, it seemed to some part of me that this shadow self was leading the "correct" life, the life I should have been leading. For a long time it kept me from accepting my own, real life, in Minnesota, being a writer, not having children.

Somewhere along the way, that shadow self died. I realized I was not her, could never have been her. I'm in the midst of my own life, and if it isn't the life I might have expected exactly, it is the life I have. I tend to think it's the life I've wanted, in spite of myself. I happen to like it. It seems to me a rich and blessed life. Every day I'm grateful for it.